Daily Archives: February 2, 2017

“‘White privilege’ gives you societal superpowers.” — Ben ShapiroIf you listen to progressives, particularly African-American progressives, you hear some of the stupidest arguments ever made. It is not because the people making them are stupid; it is because they are shrewd. What makes every argument they make unassailable is their claim of white privilege. White privilege is so ubiquitous that no white person is immune to it, and blacks that argue against it are labelled Uncle Toms.Last week I argued how former President Barack Obama had black privilege which he and his handlers so cleverly leveraged that he became the president of the United States. Obama is not unique. In many unseen areas, American society suffers from black privilege freely handed over by white politicians to win favor and votes from blacks.Before I can talk about black privilege I have to address the fallacy of white privilege.Boiled down to its core, white privilege means everything is whitey’s fault. According to Wikipedia “white privilege” is a term for societal privileges that benefit people identified as white in Western countries, beyond what is commonly experienced by non-white people under the same social, political or economic circumstances.Peggy McIntosh is high up in the hierarchy of women who hate white men. She became a famous women’s activist with a 1988 essay titled, White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies. The basis of her life’s work is influencing college students to understand one of their goals in life should be to resist the systemic oppression of white society.According to Mcintosh, “whites in Western societies enjoy advantages that non-whites do not experience, as an invisible package of unearned assets.”What is so insidious about the notion of white privilege is that white people may not recognize they have it. That’s right, if you are white and reading this now, you are a racist. But there is hope. If white people are willing to admit that they are racists they can come to terms with their condition. It works like Alcoholics Anonymous or any self-help group; the key to overcoming your problem is first admitting you have a problem. Instead of saying my name is Fred and I’m an alcoholic, it would be my name is Fred and I’m a racist.Supposedly, when enough white people come to understand their problem, the nation can heal. With a Marxist economy based on equality, the United States can take its first steps to becoming a utopia.Big on the list of white people getting better is step nine of the 12 steps: “Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.”Bingo! In the end it comes down to money. To exorcise my white demons I don’t need a priest. I don’t need holy water or the words “Christ compels you!” I just need MSNBC broadcasting, “Al Sharpton compels you!”Bruce Dixon asks in a Black Agenda radio commentary:Who drives the Democratic Party? Not the black, brown and poor who are its base voters, trapped in its trunk. Black voters in particular are not “strategic voters” so much as captive constituents of the privatizers, gentrifiers, jailers, banksters and military contractors who steer the Democratic Party. Our only strategic decision is whether to remain captives or pull the latch and escape from the Democratic wing of the party of the rich.Good ol‘ boy BillCase in point is the fattest hog in the Democratic pen, Hillary Clinton. While campaigning for the presidency last July, Clinton spoke for hundreds of millions of white people who haven’t yet come to recognize their privilege:While American’s need to do a much better job of listening when African Americans talk… We need to recognize our privilege and practice humility rather than assume our experiences are everyone else’s experiences.Is Clinton serious? I don’t think there is one person on this planet who has my life experiences or yours. And before she got going with white people need to reform, I hope she gave this lecture to her husband, Bill. In their book, Game Change, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin reported that at a social reception in 2008 for Obama, Bill Clinton said to Senator Ted Kennedy, “A few years ago, this guy (Obama) would have been getting us coffee.” Deceased NBC newsman Tim Russert also said he heard those words.But the worst are the sanctimonious, highly educated African Americans who camp out at MSNBC and CNN. Last July, CNN political commentator Marc Lamont Hill declared that black people cannot be racist because they lack the “institutional power” required to “deploy racism.” Hill was defending Black Lives Matter, contending that with a few exceptions, its members are not racists. Not racists? This is the organization that told whites who were protesting with their black brothers and sisters to get to the back of the crowd so their white faces would not appear in the newspaper or the sweep of a news ca

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President Trump is picking a fight with one of the world’s biggest action stars over TV ratings.At the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., the president joked about “The Apprentice” creator, Mark Burnett, and the low ratings the show has had since Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped into the role the president formerly held as the show’s host.“When I ran for president, I had to leave the show,” Trump told the crowd. “And they hired a big, big movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to take my place. And we know how that turned out. The ratings went right down the tubes, it’s been a total disaster and Mark will never, ever bet against Trump again.”

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Doctor-assisted suicide could save Canada tens of millions of dollars annually by avoiding costly “end-of-life” care, according to a provocative new analysis.The savings — up to $139 million annually — will almost certainly dwarf the costs associated with helping dying patients kill themselves, University of Calgary researchers report.The authors go to pains to state they aren’t suggesting people be voluntarily euthanized to save money. “Neither patients nor physicians should consider costs when making the very personal decision to request, or provide, this intervention,” they write in this week’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.However, their attempt to cost out the controversial practice is an issue many have avoided touching.

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Look around you, people of the internet. The bots. They’re everywhere.Most website visitors aren’t humans, but are instead bots—or, programs built to do automated tasks. They are the worker bees of the internet, and also the henchmen. Some bots help refresh your Facebook feed or figure out how to rank Google search results; other bots impersonate humans and carry out devastating DDoS attacks.Overall, bots—good and bad—are responsible for 52 percent of web traffic, according to a new report by the security firm Imperva, which issues an annual assessment of bot activity online. The 52-percent stat is significant because it represents a tip of the scales since last year’s report, which found human traffic had overtaken bot traffic for the first time since at least 2012, when Imperva began tracking bot activity online. Now, the latest survey, which is based on an analysis of nearly 17 billion website visits from across 100,000 domains, shows bots are back on top.

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If you are dependent upon an embedded medical device, should the device that helps keep you alive also be allowed to incriminate you in a crime? After all, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects a person from being forced to incriminate themselves.Nonetheless, that’s what happened after a house fire in Middletown, Ohio.WCPO Cincinnati caught video of the actual fire, as well delivered news that the owner’s cat died in the fire. As a pet owner, it would be hard to believe that a person would set a fire and leave their pet to die in that fire. The fire in question occurred back in September 2016; the fire department was just starting an investigation to determine the cause of the blaze.

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Does the battery on your phone run out too soon? What about your camera or GPS? To solve this everyday dilemma, Hahna Alexander, co-founder and CEO of SolePower, developed a removable insole for shoes, enabling wearers to charge their devices as they walk. SolePower was launched in 2012 after the idea arose from a design project at Carnegie Mellon University where Alexander and her fellow classmates were asked to solve a problem for students. They decided to create shoes with lights to make it easier for people to see in the dark. After researching the project, however, Alexander realized the shoes could harness other types of energy. So, SolePower was born.

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What’s the difference between a beer can and a mayonnaise jar? It sounds like the opening to a bad joke, but it’s also the basis for a legal and regulatory battle being waged between the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) and an Austin-area small business.Cuvee Coffee is a coffee bar located in a hip area of east Austin. Founded by Michael McKim, Cuvee’s sells beer on tap. Customers who want their beer to-go can have them placed in a growler (a large resealable bottle) or using a crowler (a machine that seals the beer in an aluminum can with a standard pop top).

It takes several minutes to produce a can of beer using a crowler and, because the device doesn’t eliminate oxygen from the can, the beer won’t stay fresh for as long as canned beer bought in stores. As such, crowlers are useless as a way to mass-produce canned beer.Texas law requires businesses that wish to “bottle and can beer and pack it into containers for resale” to hold a manufacturer’s license from TABC. Texas also prohibits the same entity from holding licenses for both the manufacture and retail sale of alcohol. Dating from the years after Prohibition, this mandatory separation is argued to be needed to combat organized crime. In practice the rules often serve to limit competition.

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(NEWSER) – Perhaps you know someone who’s written his name in snow, you know, with urine. That’s essentially what some fish do every day. In a study titled, “To pee or not to pee: urine signals mediate aggressive interactions in the cooperatively breeding cichlid,” researchers explain that urination for the cichlid fish is not only a bodily function but also a form of communication, per Science. To figure that out, they injected the fish with a dye that turned urine blue, then measured a fish’s urine while it was kept separate from other fish. Researchers then placed a larger cichlid and a smaller cichlid in the same tank, separated by a transparent barrier. When the fish spotted each other, they swam toward the barrier in an aggressive manner with fins raised and peed.

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Short Bytes: If you’re searching for a YouTube alternative, BitChute is a people-powered video streaming website. To host a video, it takes help of the web browser-based client WebTorrent which uses peer to peer file sharing over the BitTorrent network. At this time, BitChute has limited features, but it wants to become a platform freer than websites like YouTube.

YouTube might be the biggest video sharing platform in the world, but there is a lot of hanky-panky content hidden behind YouTube’s curtains. Also, its censorship filter – to please the governments – has made things uneasy for the people creating videos on sensitive topics. It is hard for them to leverage YouTube as a monetization platform in comparison to other content creators.

BitChute is an attempt by Ray Vahey to provide a video sharing platform that’s free from censorship. The best thing is that BitChute, using WebTorrent, works in a P2P fashion over the BitTorrent network, eliminating hardware and high bandwidth costs. WebTorrent is a BitTorrent client developed by MIT. It works inside the web browsers and requires no installation.

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(NEWSER) – Charlotte McCourt has sold more than 15,000 boxes of Girl Scout cookies in a manner so unconventional it’s making news: The 11-year-old has been unflinchingly honest. Trefoils? “Kind of boring.” Toffee-tastic? “As flavorless as dirt.” Savannah Smiles? “Divine.” (Not all were negative.) Charlotte, a New Jersey sixth-grader, was dismayed that only two of the boxes she had sold were marked to be donated to US military troops, so her father suggested she write a letter to a wealthy family friend who might be willing to donate a bunch. The result? A letter that described each cookie in brutally honest terms, including demerits for “blandness” to Do-Si-Dos. “I played it by ear and I just kept typing until I thought the letter was good,” Charlotte tells ABC News. The wealthy friend did indeed send 25 boxes of cookies to the troops, but it was a Facebook post that made Charlotte’s cookie sales hit warp speed.

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Short Bytes: Cryptkeeper is a popular Linux encryption application that’s used to encrypt your valuable data. But, it’s not as safe as you think. A bug has was recently discovered that allows universal decryption using a single letter password “p.” Debian developer Simon McVittie has advised the dev team to take it out of Debian altogether.Encryption apps are supposed to act as an extra, solid layer of security for protecting your data. But, what if the encryption app installed on your operating system is not as safe as you expect it to be?

A developer, recently, made a similar revelation.Cryptkeeper is a popular Linux encryption app that, surprisingly, allows universal decryption using a single letter password “p.” This Cryptkeeper version with the flaw was found in Debian 9, which is currently in testing. Developer Kirill Tkhai discovered the flaw.The Debian developer Simon McVittie writes that it might be happening due to an adverse interaction with encfs’ command line interface. With a simulated pressing of “p”, Cryptkeeper envokes encfs and sets the passwords to just “p” letter.

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NEWARK, Ohio (AP) — Police in central Ohio helped a teenage leukemia patient cross off a bucket-list item that was seriously shocking: She wanted to use a stun gun on someone.Sixteen-year-old Alyssa Elkins got to do that Sunday. After a bit of training from Newark police, she zapped Sgt. Doug Bline — who’d been first among the police department employees who volunteered for the task — as a crowd of supporters watched. Bline winced and fell onto a mat, guided by spotters.”It is unpleasant to say the least, but if for five seconds if it makes somebody’s kind of dream come true, especially in her situation, I think it was well worth it,” Bline said.Alyssa described the experience as “awesome.”

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As open source-powered hardware like Arduino and Raspberry Pi becomes more and more mainstream, its cost keeps dropping, which opens the door to new and innovative IoT and STEM applications. As someone who’s passionate about both, I’m always on the lookout for new innovations that can be applied in industry, the classroom, and my daughter’s robotics team. When I heard about the Orange Pi as being a “Raspberry Pi killer,” I paused to take notice.Despite the sour sounding name, the Orange Pi Zero intrigued me. I recently got my hands on one and in this article share my first impressions. Spoiler alert: I was very impressed.Why Orange Pi?Orange Pi is a family of Linux-powered, single board computers manufactured by Shenzhen Xunlong Software Co., Limited, and sold on AliExpress. As with anything sold on AliExpress, be patient and plan ahead for shipping times of two to four or more weeks, because the products are shipped directly from mainland China to locations around the world.

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A tiger has been shot dead after a man who climbed a fence into the tiger enclosure to avoid paying for a ticket was mauled to death at a zoo in eastern China.The attack was captured on camera and shared on social media, with one video showing a tiger gnawing on the man’s body as people screamed.A local government statement said the victim, identified only by his surname of Zhang, climbed a fence with a friend instead of buying tickets, at a resort in Zhejiang province on Saturday.The statement said Zhang’s wife and two children, and his friend’s wife, bought tickets to enter the zoo.But Zhang allegedly passed through a wire netting and eventually climbed a wall to enter the tiger enclosure while his friend stayed back, the statement said.

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PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING journalist Seymour Hersh said in an interview that he does not believe the U.S. intelligence community proved its case that President Vladimir Putin directed a hacking campaign aimed at securing the election of Donald Trump. He blasted news organizations for lazily broadcasting the assertions of U.S. intelligence officials as established facts.The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill speaks with Seymour Hersh at his home in Washington, D.C. two days after Donald Trump’s inauguration.Hersh denounced news organizations as “crazy town” for their uncritical promotion of the pronouncements of the director of national intelligence and the CIA, given their track records of lying and misleading the public.

“The way they behaved on the Russia stuff was outrageous,” Hersh said when I sat down with him at his home in Washington, D.C., two days after Trump was inaugurated. “They were just so willing to believe stuff. And when the heads of intelligence give them that summary of the allegations, instead of attacking the CIA for doing that, which is what I would have done,” they reported it as fact. Hersh said most news organizations missed an important component of the story: “the extent to which the White House was going and permitting the agency to go public with the assessment.”

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In my nightmares, I’m eating an energy bar. I unwrap it, scarf the whole thing down, and then come to the instant, heart-stopping realization that I have just poisoned myself. I thought for sure I checked the label—I always check the label—but it doesn’t matter now because I’ve already swallowed. The gluten is already in my system.This is when I wake up.I know that it sounds melodramatic, even paranoid. I also know that if you experienced blinding pain, a gastrointestinal meltdown, and lasting internal damage every time even a smidge of gluten passed through your lips you’d be paranoid too. You’d pepper your waiter with questions about what exactly is in that sauce and hesitate to trust his casual “I think it’s fine” response. And if you had a way to check whether that waiter actually knew what he was talking about, you’d probably take it. If only for the vindication.

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Microsoft’s Redmond campus got a late-night visit from a nude jogger Friday.Officers on the south side of the tech giant’s campus, near 15320 N.E. 40th St., stopped the man about 3:30 a.m. after “seeing nude buttocks illuminated by a streetlight,” according to a city news release.The man was wearing nothing but black Sketchers sneakers, police said.After being placed in the back of a patrol car, the man told police he was “trying to build up his immune system to fight the cold weather.”Police warn that jogging in the nude could be considered indecent exposure — although the man was not charged with a crime.“We do not have pictures to share of this incident,” police said in the release. “You are welcome.”

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Fairmount, NY — The insurance company for a Dunkin Donuts on West Genesee Street in Fairmount has agreed to pay $50,000 to a 12-year-old boy who ate a “foul smelling” doughnut 5 1/2 years ago.A settlement agreement filed this month in state Supreme Court says the boy’s mother purchased the doughnut on Aug. 25, 2011. The boy was 7 years old.The cashier acknowledged that the box of doughnuts smelled bad, but the boy had eaten one by that point.A day later, while at the State Fair, the boy started having facial tics and eye twitching. He was taken to the Upstate University Hospital emergency room to rule out seizures and later released.In the next few days, he saw his pediatrician and a neurologist. Neither of them found anything that appeared to point to lasting damage.

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While I did predict that “The USA are about to face the worst crisis of their history” as far back as October of last year, a month before the elections, I have to admit that I am surprised and amazed at the magnitude of struggle which we see taking place before our eyes. It is now clear that the Neocons did declare war on Trump and some, like Paul Craig Roberts, believe that Trump has now returned them the favor. I sure hope that he is right.Let’s look at one telling example:US intelligence agencies are now investigating their own boss! Yes, according to recent reports, the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and Treasury Department are now investigating the telephone conversations between General Flynn and the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyk. According to Wikipedia, General Flynn is the formerDirector of the Defense Intelligence AgencyJoint Functional Component Command for Intelligence, Surveillance and ReconnaissanceChair of the Military Intelligence BoardAssistant Director of National IntelligenceSenior intelligence officer for the Joint Special Operations Command.

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IN 2010, President Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and the agency successfully carried out that order a year later with a September, 2011 drone strike. While that assassination created widespread debate – the once-again-beloved ACLU sued Obama to restrain him from the assassination on the ground of due process and then, when that suit was dismissed, sued Obama again after the killing was carried out – another drone-killing carried out shortly thereafter was perhaps even more significant yet generated relatively little attention.